Ramen and Ramune - A Cyberpunk Meal Scene [UE4]

I've been working on a larger diorama environment with some sci-fi and cyberpunk themes, so I wanted to spin off some individual assets and develop those full to give myself a visual and quality target to guide me as I dug into texturing and surfacing. One of those assets was a Ramune-style codd neck glass bottle with label design and everything. Once I had a bottle looking the way I wanted, I decided to throw together a few more assets to finish out a little scene and make a mini project out of it. So here it is! The ArtStation link is here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8E36R

I made a quick mock-advertisement for the assets based on 80s advertising and cyberpunk design languages:

The initial and overall goal was to get the glass bottle looking as good as possible. I started with Michal Orzelek's excellent Advanced Glass Material Pack as a base and spent a lot of time testing out various settings, combinations, and set ups. In the end, the bottle is made up of an outer mesh, an inner wall mesh, and an interior liquid mesh, each with their own different settings. The bottle's inner and outer wall materials have refraction indexes that add up to a normal glass refraction index of 1.5ish so the effect is pretty realistic. The interior liquid material has a sealed and an open version to communicate carbonation and the outer glass material has a room temperature and a cold version. Additionally there is a sealed top asset and an open asset as well. These seem to cover all of the use cases.

All graphic design and packaging design is original except for a few elements (like the Cup Noodle ingredients text) and fonts and such. All logos are original design as well.

I learned a lot about glass shaders and effects. Current gen engines and their out-of-the-box features seem to be pretty dang good at rendering glass panes like windows, but when it comes to sculptures or bottles/vases, etc it's another story. I'm sure some talented technical artists could do some really awesome stuff, but this glass bottle is probably the most expensive asset I've ever made in my career rendering-wise, so it's no surprise that it's easier to just cheat the effect and move on. While working on this I was playing Uncharted 4 and noticed that the drink glasses were significantly simpler than this scene despite everything else in that game being impeccably rendered! Everything at the expense of something else, right?